Shrinking Beeps

The beeps get shorter and shorter, until they become so short that we can’t tell them apart and they merge into a continuous sound.

Length is one of the main parameters of traditional music and is really useful for allowing us to describe and work with sounds.

Composition Tip

When creating a work, it is often a good idea to use a mixture of long and short sounds.

This will add to the diversity in your piece and give you a rich texture.

Note Length and Traditional Musical Notation

Time and duration is notated horizontally in traditional musical scores, with different icons and shapes to indicate different note durations. This allows us to see individual note durations and groups of notes representing rhythmical patterns.

However, some sounds possess their own internal rhythmic patterns and cannot easily be described by using traditional notation.

When working with sounds, we can’t rely on a visual diagram of rhythms. We must rely on our ears and an ability to listen out for sounds as they begin, stop and interact with other sounds.

Difficult to Describe

It would be difficult to notate the different durations of every sound within this short clip.

It is more useful for us to think about the duration of this smooth granular cloud, than to think about the many individual small sounds that make it up. This is because the individual sounds all work together to create a larger texture.

Fact

Granular clouds are collections of very small sounds (in exactly the same way that clouds in the sky are collections of water droplets). They are highly textural, but can also have their own gestural direction.